Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Eros and Elegy

1

there are days love
fills with hortatory exuberance,
shouting over
restraint and dignity --
electrically charged, making
the receiver
a cheerleader for democracy,
a poet of erotic contact
and corporal unity;

2

then there are those days
it grows so large
love needs to venture out for air
from suffocating chests, and pulls
the lovers to wrestle with
the magnetic waves
that push and repel,
hand in hand from despair,
lost in a parallel gaze;

3

and there are those days
when love is on a meditative hiatus,
stopping in its tracks
to listen, to detect, to learn,
to study -- compelled to reinvent
the lover into an aerobic walker
rushing among the populated thoughts
of the rare, the sublime and
celestial courts of the mind,

4

but the day that love
truly is love is when it meets
its opposite in kind,
when it shows the strength
to configure grief, and
rallies against elegies --
tearing open curtains
that come down before
the light fully fades;

5

yes; when there are those days;
yes; on that fateful day
love wades in the darkened land
and saves the lover
with its guiding hand
and this promise: the tears of today
will not put out the fire
of tomorrow, and surviving the sun's
sorrow, love will journey on.